Full Moon Beatdown in Baltimore

There is a theatrical device called ‘breaking the fourth wall’. That is when an actor steps off the stage and addresses, even confronts their audience directly, breaking the wall separating the audience from the theatrical illusion on stage before them. Both actor and audience are freed of their roles as perpetrator and observer of the scene on the proscenium, sets and all.

On Friday, January 29, with the Full Moon opposite our Aquarian Sun and conjunct retrograde Mars, President Obama broke a fourth wall of politics, stepping away from the White House podium and into a python pit.  At the Republican Party’s invitation, he spoke at its congressional retreat in Baltimore, Maryland, where the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the room was 140 to one.

In the course of 90 minutes the president spoke and then took questions from the opposition party, during which time he demolished Republican talking points used to discredit the Democrats’ health care reform bill and the administration’s stimulus plan. Furthermore, he placed the blame for the economy squarely on the Bush administration and the Republican congressional majority’s legislation passed during the mid nineties: welfare reform, decreased tax burden for the wealthiest, laws ending careful scrutiny and regulation of the banking industry, intractable wars costing billions daily and dragging on without end.

The president put the old mythology of Democrats being profligate spenders–a relic of Reagan Republicanism — to bed.  His administration inherited both the mess and the debt left the U.S. in the trillions of dollars, caused by the eight years of financial squandering of the Clinton administration’s $250 billion surplus by Bush and the Republican majority in Congress. He denounced the disintegration of political discourse from civil disagreement to violent ideology, calling it a waste of time and the public’s trust for politicians to engage in while the country was burning. He said what was stuck in most Democrats’ throats these last ten years. In the president’s litany, you could clearly hear what was basically an indictment of the entire fifteen year era of Pluto in Sagittarius.

It could very well be that this Full Moon was indeed an important player. As part of Cosmic Confidential’s Jan. 27 diary on the full moon chart for the upcoming weekend, it was presaged:

Yet the Moon applies an emotional overlay to what we want: it’s like a veil of denial, that we’re trying to remove and get to the heart of the matter. Leo represents the heart. Mars represents desire. The retrograde represents conflicted desire, or the search for what we want. This is deeply personal stuff; sometimes seeming too personal for personal acknowledgment (that is never really true), but certainly too personal for admission in a relationship.

This Moon makes things more complex because while the relationship could be seen as personal (Sun/Moon, Venus/Mars involved), Aquarius is a collective entity of some kind. It’s not just one relationship partner who may have an interest in knowing how you feel; it may be a group of people who have this interest. I know this may be difficult, but I suggest checking in with how much you may have to say, and rather than letting that feeling well up, you know, the one that helps you empathize with throwing something through a window, or worse…make some decisions.

Get real with your feelings: first with you, then, calmly and directly, with those who matter.

At the end, the president left the 140 congressional Republicans attending in shell shock. Some were asking for the president’s autograph and a photo op. Worse yet for the Republicans, with the exception of Fox News, it was covered in its entirety on national television. Fox cut short its coverage when it became apparent the Republicans were not going to win this one.

In the aftermath, the national pundit class was uniformly surprised and impressed: not only did the president deliver in attempting in public to reach a bi-partisan relationship, he also broke the mold in a ground-breaking way by responding at last and impressively to his critics, doing it in their own venue, at their invitation and in such a way that it made compelling political television. It was civil, adult and intelligent. Needless to say, Fox News network could not invent anything to surpass it,  and it was unanimous that Republicans vowed to never invite him over again. At least not in a nationally televised format.

All politics is theater. And trust me, there will be back and forth on this in the weeks ahead between the players. This is, after all, a mid-term election year and stakes are high. Those who were slapped will try to slap back. But for now, the president did something remarkable. On the Full Moon last Friday, he stepped off the White House portico breaking through that fourth wall, walked into a lion’s den, and cut not only to the chase but through the bullshit. In Cosmic Confidential’s diary of January 31, Eric says:

The thing that’s exact today is Saturn square Pluto. This is the second of three exact contacts of these two worlds, which form a square in a cluster of three close events, about every 18 years. This aspect is emblematic of all the political contention that is flying around lately; the tension, the pressure to change. In a world where so much changes meaninglessly, and where so much that needs to change cries out for significance, this aspect is going to be helpful, though it’s suggesting that we take one step at a time and be as gentle as possible in the process of making adjustments.

Let’s hope that same ferocity of purpose for everyday Americans that propelled the president off the White House stage to face down his political enemies in Baltimore will evolve beyond the illusory wall that is politics into tangible results for the country. What he did needs to go viral. The players on both sides of the aisle need to get their butts out of their seats and back to work for us. Maybe, just maybe, they could all spend a little time listening to the stars and others instead of just themselves.

Yours and truly,

Fe Bongolan
San Francisco